The Forbidden Zone.

London: William Heinemann, Ltd,, 1929. One of the greatest of all wartime books by a woman First edition, first impression, an exceptional copy in the jacket, rare thus. In 1915 Chicago-born Mary Borden (1886-1968) "went to Dunkirk to work in a typhoid hospital; she remained in France, running (at her own expense) a mobile hospital at the front. In recognition of her services she received the Croix de Guerre and was made a member of the Légion d'honneur... [her] most enduring book is The Forbidden Zone (1929), sketches and poems written with a bleak realism that make this one of the greatest of all wartime books by a woman" (Nicola Beauman in ODNB). This "collection of fragments", as Borden calls it in her Preface, is dedicated to "the Poilus who passed through our hands during the war" and is divided into three parts: "The North", "The Somme: Hospital Sketches", and "Poems", four of which are included in Poetry of the First World War: An Anthology (Tim Kendall (ed.), OUP 2013, pp. 75-84). Octavo. Original black cloth, gilt lettered spine, shattered tree motif (reproduced from frontispiece) on front cover, grey patterned endpapers. With dust jacket. Half-tone frontispiece of "The zone at Thiepval, near the Somme, in 1916. From the drypoint by Percy Smith"; title page printed in blue and black. A fine copy in an exceptional jacket, marred only by some toning around spine and along top edge. Not in Falls or Lengel.